University site on Strapi, matching program pages to the ad campaign people came from
Hi everyone, I work in the marketing office of a mid-size university and I could use some guidance from people who have done this before.
We run paid campaigns for individual programs, nursing, engineering, and the MBA mostly, and because of how our approvals work, every ad has to land on the main homepage rather than a dedicated page. So a prospective nursing student clicks a nursing ad and gets our generic hero about campus life, which is not great for anyone.
Building and maintaining a separate landing page per ad is not realistic with our team size and our content approval process. The site runs on Strapi with a React frontend. Is there a way to swap just the homepage hero based on which campaign someone came from, without a page per ad?
2 answers
This is a very standard pattern and you do not need extra pages at all. The way it works with Croct on a Strapi site: you map the homepage hero component to a single slot, then create one experience per campaign audience. The audience conditions read the campaign parameters straight from the URL, for example:
campaign's source is "google" and campaign's name matches "mba"and similar ones for nursing and engineering. Each experience serves the matching program hero, authored once in the experience itself. Anyone arriving organically, or from a campaign you have not covered, simply gets your existing Strapi hero because that content stays the default for the slot.
So the whole thing is one slot mapping in the frontend (a one-time dev task) plus three experiences your team manages from the dashboard. No landing page factory, no approval cycle per ad.
Adding to Sofia's answer: there is a walkthrough of exactly this campaign-to-content pattern in the marketing campaign playbook on the Croct blog, worth reading before you set up the audiences.
Two practical tips from doing this on an education site. First, make sure your ads actually carry consistent UTM parameters, since the campaign conditions match on source, medium, and name, and inconsistent naming across ad platforms is the usual reason a hero does not swap. Second, start with your highest-spend program and measure it before rolling out all three, it gives you a before and after number to show whoever approves these things.